Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Over the last couple of years, it’s become increasingly common for clinical studies to draw on data gathered from EMRs — so common, in fact, that last year the FDA issued official guidance on how researchers should use such data.

Intermingling research observations and EMR-based clinical data poses different problems than provider-to-provider data exchanges. Specifically, the FDA recommends that when studies use EMR data in clinical investigations, researchers make sure that the source data are attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original and accurate, a formulation known as ALCOA by the feds.

It seems unlikely that most EMR data could meet the ALCOA standard at present. However, apparently the pharmas are working to solve this problem, according to a nice note I got from PR rep Jamie Adler-Palter of Bayleaf Communications.

For a number of reasons, clinical research has been somewhat paper-bound in the past. But that’s changing. In fact, a consortium of leading pharma companies known as TransCelerate Biopharma has been driving an initiative promoting “eSourcing,” the practice of using appropriate electronic sources of data for clinical trials.

eSourcing certainly sounds sensible, as it must speed up what has traditionally been the very long process of biopharma innovation. Also, I have to agree with my source that working with an electronic source beats paper any day (or as she notes, “paper does not have interactive features such as pop-up help.”) More importantly, I doubt pharmas will meet ALCOA objectives any other way.

According to Adler-Palter, thirteen companies have been launched to provide eSource solutions since 2014, including Clinical Research IO (presumably a Bayleaf client). I couldn’t find a neat and tidy list of these companies, as such solutions seem to overlap with other technologies. (But my sense is that this is a growing area for companies like Veeva, which offers cloud-based life science solutions.)

For its part CRIO, which has signed up 50 research sites in North America to date, offers some of the tools EMR users have come to expect. These include pre-configured templates which let researchers build in rules, alerts and calculations to prevent deviations from the standards they set.

CRIO also offers remote monitoring, allowing the monitor to view a research visit as soon as it’s finished and post virtual “sticky notes” for review by the research coordinator. Of course, remote monitoring is nothing new to readers, but my sense is that pharmas are just getting the hang of it, so this was interesting.

I’m not sure yet what the growth of this technology means for providers. But overall, anything that makes biopharma research more efficient is probably a net gain for patients, no?

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion of artificial intelligence in public forums, some generated by thought leaders like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. Late last year Hawking actually argued that artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race.”

But most scientists and researchers don’t seem to be as worried as Gates and Hawking. They contend that while machines and software may do an increasingly better job of imitating human intelligence, there’s no foreseeable way in which they could become a self-conscious threat to humanity.

In fact, it seems far more likely that AI will work to serve human needs, including healthcare improvement. Here’s five examples of how AI could help bring us smarter medicine (courtesy of Fast Company):

Diagnosing disease:

Want to improve diagnostic accuracy? Companies like Enlitic may help. Enlitic is studying massive numbers of medical images to help radiologists pick up small details like tiny fractures and tumors.

Medication management

Here’s a twist on traditional med management strategies. The AiCure app is leveraging a smartphone webcam, in tandem with AI technology, to learn whether patients are adhering to their prescription regimen.

Virtual clinicians

Though it may sound daring, a few healthcare leaders are considering giving no-humans-involved health advice a try. Some are turning to startup Sense.ly, which offers a virtual nurse, Molly. The Sense.ly interface uses machine learning to help care for chronically-ill patients between doctor’s visits.

Drug creation:

AI may soon speed up the development of pharmaceutical drugs. Vendors in this field include Atomwise, whose technology leverages supercomputers to dig up therapies for database of molecular structures, and Berg Health, which studies data on why some people survive diseases.

Precision medicine:

Working as part of a broader effort seeking targeted diagnoses and treatments for individuals, startup Deep Genomics is wrangling huge data sets of genetic information in an effort to find mutations and linkages to disease.

In addition to all of these clinically-oriented efforts, which seem quite promising in and of themselves, it seems clear that there are endless ways in which computing firepower, big data and AI could come together to help healthcare business operations.

Just to name the first applications that popped into my head, consider the impact AI could have on patient scheduling, particularly in high-volume hostile environments. What about using such technology to do a better job of predicting what approaches work best for collecting patient balances, and even to execute those efforts is sophisticated way?

And of course, there are countless other ways in which AI could help providers leverage clinical data in real time. Sure, EMR vendors are already rolling out technology attempting to help hospitals target emergent conditions (such as sepsis), but what if AI logic could go beyond condition-specific modules to proactively predicting a much broader range of problems?

The truth is, I don’t claim to have a specific expertise in AI, so my guesses on what applications makes sense are no better than any other observer’s. On the other hand, though, if anyone reading this has cool stories to tell about what they’re doing with AI technology I’d love to hear them.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I recently came across a great article talking about marketers need to decode the EHR for Pharma. It’s been really interesting to see the evolution on pharma’s relationship with EHR software. No doubt they’ve all always seen a tremendous opportunity, but they’ve all treaded lightly because of the possible undue influence on a provider.

The article did make an interesting comparison between how pharma approaches EHR and how they approached social media in the past:

Their pervasiveness has raised eyebrows throughout pharma. What’s happening with EHR “reminds me of the early days of being in the digital center of excellence [DCOE],” Flaiz recalled. “Social was exploding. It belonged to corporate comms, brands, PR — there wasn’t anyone who didn’t think they owned it.”

The same thing is happening now with EHR, but with a different cast of characters: trade, pricing, medical affairs, R&D, marketing, and the DCOE — all want a piece, she said.

I also love that the article frankly states that agencies will focus on placing banners and messaging and that marketers will need to focus on a much deeper approach to marketing pharma in an EHR. In fact they outline the other EHR Opportunities for pharma that pharma marketing professionals should consider: clinical decision support, integration with the hub and patient-assistance programs, patient engagement and education, and scraping it for other information of value.

I’m sure that many readers of this don’t like this discussion at all. No doubt many feel like pharma shouldn’t have any relationship with an EHR vendor. That’s naive since pharma already has relationships with many EHR vendors. It’s a mistake for us to put a blind eye to this topic.

Yes, we need to proactive in talking about how EHR vendors should work with pharma and how they should not work with pharma. If we’re not involved in the conversation, we’ll miss out on the opportunity to shape the discussion.

Plus, not all pharma interaction with EHRs is bad. It can be a really good thing as long as what’s being done is transparent. Plus, the reality is that pharma is going to have an influence on doctors. Why not have that work done in an EHR where you can know what influence pharma is having on the doctor? Pharma and EHR vendors will work together. The question is how much we’re going to know about their involvement.

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source, software engineering, and health IT, but his editorial output has ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. His articles have appeared often on EMR & EHR and other blogs in the health IT space.
Andy also writes often for O'Reilly's Radar site (http://oreilly.com/) and other publications on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, and DebConf.

The previous section of this article provided whatever detail I could find on the costs of poor communications and data exchange among health care providers. But in truth, it’s hard to imagine the toll taken by communications failures beyond certain obvious consequences, such as repeated tests and avoidable medical errors. One has to think about how the field operates and what we would be capable of with proper use of data.

As patients move from PCP to specialist, from hospital to rehab facility, and from district to district, their providers need not only discharge summaries but intensive coordination to prevent relapses. Our doctors are great at fixing a diabetic episode or heart-related event. Where we fall down is on getting the patient the continued care she needs, ensuring she obtains and ingests her medication, and encouraging her to make the substantial life-style changes that can prevent reoccurrences. Modern health really is all about collaboration–but doctors are decades behind the times.

Clinicians were largely unprepared to handle the new patients brought to them by the Affordable Care Act. Examining the impact of new enrollees, who “have higher rates of disease and received significantly more medical care,” an industry spokesperson said, “The findings underscore the need for all of us in the health care system, and newly insured consumers, to work together to make sure that people get the right health care service in the right care setting and at the right time…Better communication and coordination is needed so that everyone understands how to avoid unnecessary emergency room visits, make full use of primary care and preventive services and learn how to properly adhere to their medications.” Just where the health providers fall short.

One care practice drastically lowered ER admissions through a notably low-tech policy–refering their patients to a clinic for follow-up care. This is only the beginning of what we could achieve. If modern communications were in place, hospitals would be linked so that a CDC warning could go to all of them instantly. And if clinicians and their record systems were set up to handle patient-generated data, they could discover a lot more about the patients and monitor behavior change.

How are the hospitals and clinics responding to this crisis and the public pressure to shape up? They push back as if it was not their problem. They claim they are moving toward better information sharing and teamwork, but never get there.

One of their favorite gambits is to ask the government to reward them for achieving interoperability 90 days out of the year. They make this request with no groveling, no tears of shame, no admission that they have failed in their responsibility to meet reasonable goals set seven years ago. If I delivered my projects only 25% of the time, I’d have trouble justifying myself to my employer, especially if I received my compensation plan seven years ago. Could the medical industry imagine that it owes us a modicum of effort?

Robert Schultz, a writer and entrepreneur in health care, says, “Underlying the broken communications model is a lack of empathy for the ultimate person affected–the patient. Health care is one of the few industries where the user is not necessarily the party paying for the product or service. Electronic health records and health information exchanges are designed around the insurance companies, accountable care organizations, or providers, instead of around understanding the challenges and obstacles that patients face on a daily basis. (There are so many!) The innovators who understand the role of the patient in this new accountable care climate will be winners. Those who suffer from the burden of legacy will continue to see the same problems and will become eclipsed by other organizations who can sustain patient engagement and prove value within accountable care contracts.”

Alternative factors

Of course, after such a provocative accusation, I should consider the other contributors that are often blamed for increasing health care costs.

An aging population

Older people have more chronic diseases, a trend that is straining health care systems from Cuba to Japan. This demographic reality makes intelligent data use even more important: remote monitoring for chronic conditions, graceful care transitions, and patient coordination.

The rising cost of drugs

Dramatically increasing drug prices are certainly straining our payment systems. Doctors who took research seriously could be pushing back against patient requests for drugs that work more often in TV ads than in real life. Doctors could look at holistic pain treatments such as yoga and biofeedback, instead of launching the worst opiate addiction crisis America has ever had.

Government bureaucracy

This seems to be a condition of life we need to deal with, like death and taxes. True, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) keeps adding requirements for data to report. But much of it could be automated if clinical settings adopted modern programming practices. Furthermore, this data appears to be a burden only because it isn’t exploited. Most of it is quite useful, and it just takes agile organizations to query it.

Intermediaries

Reflecting the Byzantine complexity of our payment systems, a huge number of middlemen–pharmacy benefits managers, medical billing clearinghouses, even the insurers themselves–enter the system, each taking its cut of the profits. Single-payer insurance has long been touted as a solution, but I’d rather push for better and cheaper treatments than attack the politically entrenched payment system.

Under-funded public health

Poverty, pollution, stress, and other external factors have huge impacts on health. This problem isn’t about clinicians, of course, it’s about all of us. But clinicians could be doing more to document these and intervene to improve them.

Clinicians like to point to barriers in their way of adopting information-based reforms, and tell us to tolerate the pace of change. But like the rising seas of climate change, the bite of health care costs will not tolerate complacency. The hard part is that merely wagging fingers and imposing goals–the ONC’s primary interventions–will not produce change. I think that reform will happen in pockets throughout the industry–such as the self-insured employers covered in a recent article–and eventually force incumbents to evolve or die.

The precision medicine initiative, and numerous databases being built up around the country with public health data, may contribute to a breakthrough by showing us the true quality of different types of care, and helping us reward clinicians fairly for treating patients of varying needs and risk. The FHIR standard may bring electronic health records in line. Analytics, currently a luxury available only to major health conglomerates, will become more commoditized and reach other providers.

But clinicians also have to do their part, and start acting like the future is here now. Those who make a priority of data sharing and communication will set themselves up for success long-term.

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source, software engineering, and health IT, but his editorial output has ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. His articles have appeared often on EMR & EHR and other blogs in the health IT space.
Andy also writes often for O'Reilly's Radar site (http://oreilly.com/) and other publications on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, and DebConf.

It is salubrious to stretch oneself and regularly attend a conference in a related field. At the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, one can bask in the wisdom of experts who are truly interdisciplinary (as opposed to people like me, who is simply undisciplined). Their Tenth Anniversary Conference drew about 120 participants. The many topics–which included effects of the Supreme Court rulings on the Affordable Care Act and other cases, reasons that accountable care and other efforts haven’t lowered costs, stresses on the pharmaceutical industry, and directions in FDA regulation–contained several insights for health IT professionals.

From my perspective, the center of the conference was the panel titled “Health Innovation Policy and Regulating Novel Technology.” A better title might have been “How to Make Pharma Profitable Again,” because most of the panelists specialized in pharmaceuticals or patents. They spun out long answers to questions about how well patents can protect innovation (recognizing a controversy); the good, the bad, and the ugly of pricing; and how to streamline clinical trials, possibly adding risk. Their pulses really rose when they were asked a question about off-label drug use. But they touched on health IT and suggested many observations that could apply to it as well.

It is well known that drug development and regulatory approval take years–perhaps up to 20 years–and that high-tech companies developing fitness devices or software apps have a radically different product cycle. As one panelist pointed out, it would kill innovation to require renewed regulatory approval for each software upgrade. He suggested that the FDA define different tiers of changes, and that minor ones with little risk of disrupting care be allowed automatically.

I look even farther. It is well known also that disruptive inventions displace established technologies. Just as people with mobile devices get along without desktop computers and even TV sets, medicines have displaced many surgical procedures. Now the medicines themselves (particularly, controversial mental health medicines) can sometimes be replaced by interactive apps and online services. Although rigorous testing is still lacking for most of these alternatives, the biggest barrier to their adoption is lack of reimbursement in our antiquated health payment system.

Instead of trying to individually fix each distortion in payment, value-based care is the reformer’s solution to the field’s inefficient use of treatment options. Value-based care requires more accurate information on quality and effectiveness, as I recently pointed out. And this in turn may lead to the more flexible regulations suggested by the panelist, with a risk that is either unchanged or raised by an amount we can tolerate.

Comparisons between information and other medical materials can be revealing. For instance, as the public found out in the Henrietta Lacks controversy, biospecimens are treated as freely tradable information (so long as the specimen is de-identified) with no patient consent required. It’s assumed that we should treat de-identified patient information the same way, but in fact there’s a crucial difference. No one would expect the average patient to share and copy his own biospecimens, but doing so with information is trivially easy. Therefore, patients should have more of a say about how their information is used, even if biospecimens are owned by the clinician.

Some other insights I picked up from this conference were:

Regulations and policies by payers drive research more than we usually think. Companies definitely respond to what payers are interested in, not just to the needs of the patients. One panelist pointed out that the launch of Medicare Part D, covering drugs for the first time, led to big new investments in pharma.

Hotels and other service-oriented industries can provide a positive experience efficiently because they tightly control the activities of all the people they employ. Accountable Care Organizations, in contrast, contain loose affiliations and do not force their staff to coordinate care (even though that was the ideal behind their formation), and therefore cannot control costs.

Patents, which the pharma companies consider so important to their business model, are not normally available to diagnostic tests. (The attempt by Myriad Genetics to patent the BRACA1 gene in order to maintain a monopoly over testing proves this point: the Supreme Court overturned the patent.) However, as tests get more complex, the FDA has started regulating them. This has the side effect of boosting the value of tests that receive approval, an advantage over competitors.

Thanks to Petrie-Flom for generously letting the public in on events with such heft. Perhaps IT can make its way deeper into next year’s conference.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

For those not familiar with Martin, he was blasted by social media and the regular media (you can guess which one came first) after his company Turing Pharmaceuticals AG raised the price of an anti-parasite tablet more than 50-fold. That’s taking the drug Daraprim from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

After the outcry he later said he’d cut the price of the drug as much as 50% to hospitals. He also said that there were lots of programs for people to get the drug if they weren’t financially able. That didn’t appease most people who still saw Martin as taking advantage of the health care system and vulnerable patients who needed the drug to survive. Some even called him “the most hated man in America.”

The story doesn’t end there. At the Forbes Healthcare Summit Martin Shkreli admitted that he messed up when he raised the Daraprim drug price over 5,000% overnight. “I would have raised prices higher,” Shkreli vowed on Thursday, after being asked how he would re-do the past three months. “That’s my duty.” So, he reneged on his promise to lower the price of the drug and wishes he’d raised the price higher.

As if that weren’t enough, Martin Shkreli was planning to do the same with another Leukemia drug owned by the almost dead company KaloBios. Martin bought up shares of the company and brought $3 million of investment to save the company. It seems he was looking to do the same thing with KaloBios as he’d done with Turing Pharmaceuticals AG.

You can imagine the outcry over Martin doubling down on his approach to raising the price of pharma drugs. However, many are claiming that karma caught up with Martin Shkreli (and lots of other claims including him “paying” for ripping Taylor Swift and other odd and hilarious comments) as he was just arrested on fraud charges. The charges are unrelated to the stories above, but instead go back to his time as manager for the hedge fund MSMB Capital Managment and Chief Executive of biopharmaceutical company Retrophin Inc. On news of the arrest, KaloBios stock feel 50% before trading was halted, losing Martin over $25 million.

It’s hard to ignore a story like this. It’s just kind of unbelievable and the public outcry to what Martin has done. He sees himself as the public enemy and for many he is just that. While I think what Martin is doing is despicable, I personally don’t think there’s that much value in vilifying his actions if we don’t ask the tough questions that his actions raise. I’m no pharma expert, but I can’t image that Martin is the only one employing these practices. Was he just the one that got caught and the one that caught the public eye?

Here’s some questions that I think Martin’s story raises that are worth discussing:

What do we do about pharma companies that have a monopoly on a niche drug? Should their be price controls on them?

What price is fair for them to charge to make a return on their admittedly risky investment? Is there a calculus that makes sense for the patients who depend on the drug and the drug maker who needs to make a profit off their investment?

Is it ok to overcharge for a current drug in order to reinvest that money to develop new drugs? Will the overcharge actually be used to develop new drugs and not just line the pockets of the investors? Maybe they reinvest in research for a few cycles of new drugs, but at what point does the excess stop being reinvested?

Martin calls this the “dirty truth” of pharma. They’re in it to make money. Let’s start a conversation about this dirty truth then and find reasonable solutions for patients and pharma companies. Maybe there’s some good that could come from Martin’s actions.

Update: If you’d like a good laugh, read this piece by Andy Borowitz called “Lawyer for Martin Shkreli Hikes Fees Five Thousand Per Cent.” Brilliant!

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Today, Practice Fusion announced that they have just closed a $70 million round of funding. This series D round of funding brings Practice Fusion’s total funding to $134 million and a valuation estimated at $700 million. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, OrbiMed Advisors, and Deerfield Management Company.

We’d heard that this round was close almost 2 months ago. I’m not sure what took them so long to finally close the round. I also found it interesting in this Forbes article about the funding round that “Practice Fusion leads vendors this year in acquiring Allscripts’ former customers.” I have a feeling Aprima might have something to say about that.

The article also suggests that revenue is available from Pharma for mining the Practice Fusion data for insights. Then, they’ve always talked about the potential for pharma advertising in the Free EHR. I also had someone suggest to me recently that Practice Fusion could be making money off of selling leads to the various healthcare education companies out there. Considering the number of emails I get from these healthcare education companies, they definitely have money to spend on targeted leads.

The question I’ve asked for many years isn’t whether Practice Fusion has created value. No doubt their current user base and data set has value. The question that remains is whether they’ve created a company that merits a $700 million valuation and whether the $134 million investment will yield a quality return. Plus, can Practice Fusion build the company’s revenue while still maintaining physicians’ trust in Practice Fusion. They now have $70 million in funding to find out.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I was recently introduced to an interesting new offering in the healthcare IT space that’s trying to help facilitate the physician – pharma sales rep relationship called RxVantage. It’s always been an awkward dance between the two groups and so it’s interesting to see a company focused on facilitating the relationship. Pharma reps can bring a lot of value to a doctor when it comes to information on a new drug and access to samples for their patients. However, those reps can also be a drain on their day to day activities unless they’re managed well. This video from RxVantage is a funny look at the challenge:

I’ll admit that I’m no expert on the pharma sales rep business, but I’ve seen first hand the challenge of their job and doctors trying to juggle that relationship. I think RxVantage is an interesting way to try and facilitate the relationship between the two groups.

With pharma reps having more and more challenges and roadblocks to their relationship with doctors, it’s interesting to see a proactive way to manage that relationship. Plus, this provides a simple way to track your relationship and interaction with each provider. In some ways it’s almost like a CRM for pharma sales reps, but largely driven by the physician practice.

I’m sure we’re looking at more and more regulations when it comes to the relationship between pharma and doctors. Finding a way to manage that relationship a midst the changing regulations is going to be important.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I know these two terms could be seen as somewhat at odds. Pharma hasn’t always been the most patient centric industry. Sure, their drugs have helped out millions of patients, but there are also plenty of examples where pharma hasn’t acted in the best interest of patients.

With this as background, it’s interesting to see this $5000 prize being offered on Innocentive for “Increasing Patient Centricity of the Pharma Industry.” The topics they suggest are: eHealth, social media, data utilization and new models to commercialize therapies. The overview of the challenge says:

Focused proposals are required describing how the pharmaceutical industry can respond to increasing demand for healthcare solutions that are better integrated with the needs and values of increasingly well informed customers (patients). Proposals should be impactful and implementable.

I must admit that I haven’t thought about this question very much. The first thing that comes to mind for me with Pharma is medication compliance. I also have thought quite a bit about the Pharma – EHR relationship. I think Pharma also has to be really careful with social media because of the laws. However, they can do a lot of listening. I wonder what opportunities are available there.

I guess that’s why I love to see these type of prize challenges. It gets you thinking about things you hadn’t thought about before.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The news came out that Merck was investing up to $17 million in Physicians Interactive Holdings (better known as Skyscape.com). Here’s a section from the press release.

Physicians Interactive Holdings, Inc. the leading provider of mobile and web-based clinical resources and solutions for healthcare professionals, today announced it entered into an agreement with Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, LLC (“GHIF”) to invest up to $17 million in the Company. The financing includes an initial investment of $8.5 million and potential future investments of up to $8.5 million contingent upon achieving certain pre-specified milestones. The proceeds will be used to fund the growth initiatives of four key products and other initiatives as identified by the Board. Physicians Interactive Holdings was identified by GHIF as being on the forefront of healthcare innovation, and the investment is part of the fund’s strategy to help nurture leading global healthcare solutions.

Uh huh, nurture leading global healthcare solutions. I think this line describes what’s really in the works after they describe PIH’s clinical medical reference tools, electronic drug sampling and interactive education they say, “The solutions are blended into the clinician’s daily workflow via web, mobile and electronic health records channels…” Exactly. Is there any wonder why Merck would be interested in this type of company?

There are a lot of companies that would love to be blended into the clinician’s daily workflow. Why do you think drug companies want to find some way to access the clinician through their EHR software? It’s because the EHR software is blended into the clinician’s daily workflow. There’s no better place to advertise, market and inform someone.